Duking it out on Air America

Whoa… Let me first say something about my good friend Ron that is perhaps a little bit out of school, although he has alluded to it on his own Sirius radio show. For the last two-three years Ron Silver has been battling terminal illness, the one we most fear, taking all manner of debilitating chemo-therapy treatments, experimental and otherwise, while continuing to traipse across the country, often in acute pain, speaking out on those political issues that cost him many a Hollywood job. (He was once a leading man.) Ron Silver has shown more guts than almost any human being I know, whatever his political viewpoints.

I don’t make those kinds of claims for myself at all. But… although I have many flaws… arrogance, narcissism, frequent readers of this blog can fill in their own… I am no coward (no more than the normal one anyway). Actually, I’m a bit of a hothead – and admit it. I want to be in thick of things. On 9-11 I wasn’t in the slightest bit afraid. I was furious and ready to fight, ready to stand up for what I saw as a great danger to Enlightenment values. 9-11 wasn’t a call to cower in the corner for me. It was a call to arms in the defense of ideals I cherish. In fact, it made that clear to me as nothing before.

Mr. Hartmann, of course, had his own assumptions. He is a shrink by training – of some stripe anyway. But no matter what school of therapy he espouses, I’m sure he’s familiar with phenomenon of projection. So I'll give him tit for tat. It may be conventional liberals of his sort that were the ones terrified on 9-11, not Ron and I. It would explain their subsequent behavior.

I leave that to Hartmann to cogitate, though I suspect he will reject the idea out of hand. So it goes in our divided world. I got into a bit with him on Air America, even raised my voice a tad. I’m not sure how well I did, but if I’m to believe the emails (and comments below) I received, much better than I would have anticipated. (Hartmann’s emails may run the other way.)

Apropos the above-mentioned interview with Milt Rosenberg, who ironically is also a psychologist by training, it will soon be online as a podcast. I will post the link when available. And check out the website for the Rosenberg show (link above). The list of guests is more than a little impressive.